Syria has agreed to take back any of its citizens who are intercepted trying to reach Cyprus by boat, the Mediterranean island country’s deputy minister for migration has said.
Nicholas Ioannides confirmed that two inflatable boats each carrying 30 Syrians were turned back in recent days in line with a bilateral agreement agreed by Nicosia and Damascus.
Cypriot navy and police patrol boats intercepted the two craft after they put out a call for help. The boats were subsequently escorted back to Syria.
Ioannides told private TV station Antenna that there’s been an uptick of migrant vessels trying to reach Cyprus from Syria, unlike in recent years when boats would primarily depart from Lebanon.
Cyprus and Lebanon have a long-standing agreement to send back migrants.
Cyprus’ deputy migration minister said his government and their Syrian counterparts are trying to fight back against people traffickers who are supplying an underground market for labourers.
According to Ioannides, human traffickers are cutting deals with local employers to bring in Syrians. This is despite laws that prevent asylum-seekers from working prior to the completion of a nine-month residency period.
“The message we’re sending is that the Cyprus Republic won’t tolerate the abuse of the asylum system from people who aren’t eligible for either asylum or international protection and just come here only to work,” Ioannides said.
The Cypriot government decided last week not to automatically grant asylum to Syrian migrants, but to examine their applications individually on merit and according to international and European laws. This came six months after the ousting of dictator Bashar al-Assad in Syria.
From a total of 19,000 pending asylum applications, 13,000 have been filed by Syrian nationals, according to Ioannides.
After al-Assad was toppled in December last year and a new transitional government took power, some 2,300 Syrians have either dropped their asylum claims or rescinded their international protection status, while 2,100 have already left Cyprus for Syria.
Both the UN refugee agency and Europe’s top human rights body have urged the Cypriot government to stop pushing back migrants trying to reach the island by boat. Cyprus denies doing anything wrong.
Migrant deaths in the Mediterranean
Meanwhile, four people, including two small children, have died during an attempt to cross from Africa to Europe, a German charity has said.
ADVEReadNOWISEMENTThe nonprofit group RESQSHIP said that dozens of migrants had departed western Libya on a flimsy rubber boat with a failing engine.
On Saturday afternoon, the group’s civilian vessel NADIR found 62 of them in international waters where Malta is responsible for search and rescue.
By the time the group reached them, two children aged three and four were dead and a third person was found unconscious and died later, it said.
ADVEReadNOWISEMENTFrontex, the European border and coastguard agency, and the Maltese Armed Forces did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The Mediterranean Sea is the world’s deadliest migration route, with nearly 32,000 recorded fatalities since 2014, according to the International Organisation for Migration.